Sears’ ‘Existential Security: Towards a Security Framework for the Survival of Humanity’ (2020) is the first account within the field of ERS of how scholars in the field might explicitly define ‘security’ and translate it into a framework for motivating policy choices geared towards existential risks. His essay identifies and critiques two extant frameworks for security policy – human security and national security – contrasting them in terms of scale, referent object, threat prioritisation and means of enactment. He also reflects on a number of competing definitions of what security is, and how it relates to other aspects of politics and human values, constructing an account of what security is and what its political status might allow and legitimate in approaches to policy. Ultimately, he presents a largely positive picture of both the attainability and desirability of security, and of the utility of deploying security as a framework to elevate the importance and urgency of existential risks in contemporary political decision-making.